Essay #3: room for cream?

I am an intruder in my own neighbourhood.  I’ve lived in the Mission for over five years but I still do not feel welcome here.  I know my neighbours, I nod at passersby as I drink tall cans of Tecate on the front stoop; I have sampled every restaurant on 24^th.  I am polite to all strangers.  I strike up conversations with the homeless because I believe they have good stories to tell. (Aside: this may be the selfish writer’s inclination.) But the streets are predominantly Spanish speaking and my tall pale lumbering body feels incongruous when I pass the Mexican bakeries, the crumpled grandmothers yelling fresas! or churros! on street corners, and the severe young men in wife beaters leaning against immaculate 1960’s Cadillac DeVille’s.  I feel the leery gaze as it crosses the cultural chasm and settles on my curly hair, my overgrown beard, my green eyes, my light skin, and my towering figure.  The word gentrification flits through the periphery of my mind whenever I prance into the local taqueria for my al pastor burrito or the discount carniceria beside it.  I slip into my best Spanish accent when I order Chilaquiles con Pollo y Huevos but then I become self-conscious and another word flits through my mind: appropriation.  It seems as though there is a word for every inadvertent crime the white male might commit.  I wish the penance was equally well-defined.

Oh what ambivalence!  I know that my very presence is an affront to this carefully crafted ecosystem, this rich cultural pocket of South America.  It is my ilk and I, with our disposable incomes and our appetites for decadence, who are driving up the cost of living for those that have been here for generations.  I do not wish it so.  I hope for this place to remain unchanged.  I happily shop at grocery stores whose aisles feature mangy cats and dogs.  I buy ice cream from pushcart vendors and watch local Latin league soccer games at the local park.  I participate in curbside slam poetry circles in an effort to endear myself to this place.  I know that my ability to live in this place, the luxury of my social and geographical mobility, is just that – a luxury.  Aren’t I entitled to some level of choice?  Haven’t I worked hard to be where I am?  I am aware of the privilege afforded to me as a white male, but how do I affect change on that front, without dismissing the opportunities given to me while my peers amass fortunes and take advantage of every prospect on their horizons. I hope the act of asking does something, at least.

I do not wish to believe that I am an agent for harmful change.  I do not want to be the cause of displaced families and overstuffed apartments.  I do not want hardware stores and flower shops to shut down to make way for fancy coffee shops and mini-golf cocktail bars.  But I like mini-golf, cocktails, and coffee. I do not wish for the price of beer to go up.  I do not want to impose my ethical beliefs on the less fortunate, but I also think that a tax on sugary diabetes-causing soda is a good idea.  My migration to this delightful and historically rich locale is merely a grain of sand in an hourglass and gravity is indifferent to the grains’ desires.  I cannot make myself any bigger; I cannot force the opening in the hourglass to constrict and slow the inevitable passage of time.  Perhaps I should never have come to this place.  Perhaps all the rich and affluent should congregate in gated communities.  No – this reeks of segregation, which is far worse than the alternative.   What then?

A million dollars to whomever finds the remedy before the seas rise and drown us all.

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Alex is a Creative Writing MFA student at Antioch Universtiy Los Angeles and a Canadian expat living in San Francisco.  He writes nonfiction, fiction, and poetry.  He sometimes shares his musings and meanderings on his blog.